One last question. What happens when the the student knows more than the teacher?
It happens a lot. There's no shame in saying, "I don't know. Let's look that up!" After all, you wouldn't expect a teacher in a bricks & mortar school to know everything, would you? So why should you have to? A lot of things we learn together.
Gaps scare everyone once in a while. I just had a gap panic at the start of this year as were were facing down pre-algebra and I was doing all I could to delay it.
My foot-dragging didn't go well, however. DS8 has some gaps--he doesn't have all his times tables down 100% cold yet, for example--but he needs the conceptual work that pre-algebra provides, given where he is in math, or he gets cranky. Reviewing without giving him new concepts, too, was a bad, bad thing for his behavior (and my sanity!). Now that we've moved ahead and we merely toss in some facts review as a side dish instead of the main course, he's back to his usual cooperative self. Live and learn...
Remember that kids in b & m schools have gaps, too. No school teaches *everything there is to know*, after all, and even if they did, some kids don't get stuff the first (second, third...) time they're exposed to it. The nice thing about working with GT kids is that they learn quickly, so if there are gaps, they will be able to fill them quickly.
If you find that your kids don't know something they need to know to learn the next thing on the list, you can always go back and teach/review it. It's one of the biggest benefits of an individualized education.
I know it's scary. Totally BTDT, I promise! But keep in mind that you just have to do as good a job as the school is doing. That thought helped me a lot the first year so that I didn't become overwhelmed. If you're unhappy with how your school is doing with your kids, then that's not that hard to do, right? That first year, I realized that if my then-DS6 read a developmentally appropriate book for 30 minutes a day and played outside the rest of the time, he'd be happier and would learn more that he was in his b & m 1st grade.
Naturally he did much more than that the first year. But setting the bar pretty low helped me gain my footing. Remember that your child's education is a marathon, not a sprint. There's plenty of time. Perfectionism is not your friend if you're homeschooling. You WILL make mistakes. That's normal. (It can actually help you with your kids if you use your mistakes to talk about perfectionism. I sure do!)
As for getting back into the schools, I have a friend who says homeschooling is addictive, and I think she's right. Be warned...
We have not transitioned back into a school, so I can't speak from experience about that. I am with Shari, though, that I think it would be a challenge to do so with an HG+ child, given how they tend to gallop through the curriculum. We try to go deep and wide (i.e., studying things like foreign language that wouldn't be taught in our school system), but some measure of going fast is pretty inevitable, especially in the areas that are the child's strengths. That tends to make a return to school challenging after a few years of homeschooling.
However, if you try it for a year and don't think it's for your family, the public school has to take your child/ren back. The fit may be harder, but they can't refuse your boys.
